Creating Parallel FX! – Soundtoys Phase Mistress / Little Microshift

In this one, I’m going to show you some parallel processing stuff on a guitar track I did — I was working on this week, and thought it was something cool. I thought I’d share it.

So let’s get into it. I’m going to play the track. It sounds like this.

[mix]

I’ve been working in parallel a lot lately for whatever reason. I don’t know, I just have been, and I had this little solo guitar thing that’s kind of like a lead line.

[lead guitar]

Right. Originally without the parallel processing…

[lead guitar, dry]

That was it. Here’s it in the mix without the parallel processing.

[mix, no parallel processing]

We kind of want it to just be bigger. We don’t want to double the part. I mean, it’s country, so a lot of lead things are pretty cool to just do in mono and stick them in a place.

It’s in the center. Obviously it’s the chorus, so the vocal’s gotta do it’s thing, so we can’t get in the way. It’s sort of subtle processing to make it wider, make it bigger, make it meaner.

So what I came up with was an aux track and sent this — this thing is in pre. Solo it. This is what it sounds like with all of the processing.

ADVERTISEMENT

[guitar aux]

Right. So first we did this Little Microshift from SoundToys. It was free like, a year ago. I still use this thing any time I can think of it. I always forget I have this plug-in, but it’s got a mix knob, dry to wet, and then three options. I went with option two, because I just liked it that way.

I’ll bypass this.

[guitar aux]

Kind of models what the old Eventide boxes would do. They were real popular in the 80’s and early 90’s and stuff. Well, people still use them.

And then just because I wanted to, I used Phase Mistress. My settings look like that. Set to tempo. Pretty easy kind of modulation effect, just to give it a little moement.

[guitar aux]

And then, let’s see, is this set to pre? It is. So I can solo.

[guitar phase aux]

[mix]

So yeah. That’s it. Pretty simple thing. I’ve been doing a lot of stuff in parallel lately. Parallel distortion and things like that. So hopefully this gives you some ideas. Go check out these plug-ins. The SoundToys stuff you can’t really go wrong with. They’re pretty much my go-to for delays, phasers… Crystallizer is really fun to play with.

So anyways, check that stuff out. Also the mix contest is still going. I’ll put a link to that in the description. I think you’ve got four days left. It’s up on April 15th. You can win a copy of Ozone 5 from iZotope, as well as a 3 month subscription to PureMix.net. Fab’s tutorials are literally probably some of the best online I think. I’ve learned a ton from them.

So anyways, go check that out. Like me on Facebook, subscribe to the channel. New videos every week, and I will see you guys in the next video. Later.